


under the vale

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Background Simon Lewis/Maia Roberts, Gen, Missing Scene, Seelie Court, set between Season 2 and Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 06:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15334215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Meliorn keeps Simon company in the Seelie Realm. Set between Season 2 & Season 3.





	under the vale

**Author's Note:**

> This fic owes a big debt to Holly Black's faerie stories and a bit to _Ella Enchanted_ and a lot to the podcast _Mabel,_ which was a major inspiration for it.

Simon didn’t know dick about fairies.

He’d gone through a _Lost Boys_ phase; sat idly by while Clary and her gaggle of middle school friends practiced solemn, uninformed witchcraft; he went as a werewolf one Halloween. He remembered sitting in an Introduction to English Literature class he’d never followed up on and seeing _The Faerie Queene_ on the syllabus. Maybe that would have helped him out. Aside from cringing at the cutesy, winged figurines on his aunt’s mantle, he didn’t have any experience with fairies.

Or was it faeries? Seelies, now. A hundred variations that Jace and Izzy and Alec could rattle off if prompted: nixies, pixies, elves, ballybogs, dryads, kelpies, selkies, nymphs. Naiads had tried to pull him into one of the lakes, their glistening fingers eager on his resisting arms. The Fair Folk. They didn’t seem very fair to Simon.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been in the Seelie realm, sitting at the foot of the Queen’s throne with his guitar in his hands. That was part of it, he’d heard. The timelessness. It never seemed to be day or night, but always dusk, like how casinos keep the lights bright and air cold so the people inside would while away the hours unaware. Simon strummed until his fingers hurt and sang until his voice was hoarse, but no one would tell him how many days had passed.

He was getting hungry too. The Queen wouldn’t let him eat any of the animals, but her courtiers had offered him peaches that bled when silver knives sliced into them. He had deferred. Simon wasn’t a total idiot. Even he knew you never ate anything in another realm. Not that it mattered. He would probably be here forever anyway.

He tried to call Maia maybe fifty times, but it turned out phones? Not really a thing this side of the reservoir. The screen glitched every time he touched it, the lock screen photo of Maia fragmenting into pixels and strange symbols. That was the only thing that kind of comforted him, though: if it had really been days and days and days, then _someone_ would have come for him. He was a successful damsel. He had always been rescued.

So in the interim he played every song he knew and even some he didn’t and finally found himself saying the words dreaded by all guitar-players throughout time: “Anyway,” Simon sighed, exhausted and numb-fingered, “Here’s ‘Wonderwall.’”

“You are a skilled entertainer,” Meliorn told him later. He was a face that was both friendly and not, someone familiar but not familiar enough. “Though I admit I am predominantly glad of the break.”

“Break?” 

“That is my instrument you hold,” Meliorn said, which made Simon almost gag on air before he reminded himself to _be an adult_. “I have been at my lady’s whim since my momentary lapse in loyalty.” 

Simon looked at the scar fragmenting Meliorn’s cheek, like lightning or branches. He had seen the Queen touch it from time to time, her solemn child’s face lit with happy cruelty as she traced each broken line. Already he had seen her in so many forms: sometimes an unreadable little girl, sometimes a teasing young woman, sometimes embittered and old with oak leaves in her gray hair. For a world that was so frozen, nothing here seemed to remain where you left it.

“Come to my tent,” Meliorn said.

Simon stared at him, eyebrows raised.

“I have a collection of instruments that may assuage your ennui,” he clarified. “Such presumption, little vampire. If I were inviting you to bed, I would have said, ‘come to bed.’”

Simon actually laughed. “Alright, well, that’s good to know, I guess.”

As Meliorn led him through trees and then more trees, he continued, “I know you have taken another lover, but I assume you have not lost your mundane predisposition towards monogamy. Am I correct?”

Meliorn had a way of making Simon wish he had done better on the verbal section of his SATs. He also wished he’d been abducted by aliens. He would definitely know what to do with aliens. 

“Uh, yeah, we’re, I mean,” Simon said elegantly. He was pretty serious about Maia, hence trading his time to get her out of a situation that was his doing in the first place. But they were not _lovers_ in that they had never confessed love to one another or had any kind of sex besides feeling each other up in the back of his van after a movie once. Simon was still feeling very tender about love and it seemed like Maia was _sore_ , so all they did was dance around each other and exchange soft kisses like giddy high school sweethearts. Both of them vibrating with optimism and at the same time praying _please don’t hurt me please please don’t hurt me_. “Maia is my girlfriend, yes.”

“So I am not too presumptuous.” A canvas structure rose seemingly from nowhere in front of them, its surface elaborately decorated with a scene of silver-clad knights hunting a stag. Simon thought it was a tapestry until he got close enough to see it was painted. As he looked, the stag became a woman and all the knights except for one became dogs. They converged on him, teeth rending painted flesh. 

Meliorn broke the spell by lifting the tent’s heavy flap to admit Simon, now blinking and dazed. It took him a moment to catch on to what Meliorn was saying. “After your previous visit, I gathered that you were not one to share your partners with another. Or to be shared yourself.”

His previous visit: vines digging so deeply into his flesh that he could feel his skin starting to split like overripe fruit. Watching Jace gasp for air that Simon himself did not need. Watching Jace put his tongue in Clary’s mouth.

“I am uncomfortable,” Simon announced, voice going pitchy. “With this topic of conversation.”

“My apologies.” Meliorn laid a hand across his sturdy leather breastplate. “I did not intend to be insensitive or inappropriate.” 

He couldn’t lie, so Simon had to take him at his word. “It’s cool, buddy, but let’s just keep it all business. Where are these instruments you speak of?”

He might as well keep busy. Meliorn offered him everything from a lute to a lyre, even producing something that looked like a cross between a howling demon and a ukulele. Simon touched its carved wooden mouth with some trepidation, half expecting it to bite. In the corner stood a massive gleaming harp shaped like a swan that Simon swore he caught blinking out of the corner of his eye. 

Meliorn ducked behind a silk screen and emerged in what probably passed for Seelie loungewear: embroidered floral pants and a voluminous linen shirt. With the change of clothes his shoulders seemed to relax and his mouth to curve more pleasantly, as though he’d traded in the soldier for a songbird. Simon wondered if Seelies knights chose to enter the service; he wondered if Meliorn specifically had decided to take up a blade when he looked so at home with his fingertips on the harp. 

His scar was almost iridescent in the low light. Simon suspected he had not had a lot of choices.

“You’re being nice to me,” Simon realized, very belatedly, as he touched the taut animal skin of a small drum. He wondered if it was a trick, if the Queen wanted something else from him and decided to use Meliorn to get it. He wasn’t bad bait. Simon instinctively wanted to trust him because he was someone Isabelle liked, someone who had helped Clary once even though it jeopardized his own safety. 

He was also hot, obviously. Simon was spoken for but he had eyes. Good looks opened doors, it was a weird science thing that you just kind of accepted even if it made your stomach queasy. 

“There is courtesy to be found in the court, though you may disbelieve it.” Meliorn’s brown eyes turned a little sad. “I have learnt my lesson. There are things I cannot or will not do.” He gave Simon a significant look that he chose to interpret as _I can’t help you escape but I would totally like to_. “But a knight has honor, and a man can be kind.”

Simon considered that. “Cool,” he said simply. He sat down on the patterned rug, roses blooming and waving in an unseen breeze under his legs, and picked up the terrifying tiny guitar thing. “What’s this do?”

 

 

 

It turned out Simon was kind of killer at the lute. He had a lot of practice, retreating to Meliorn’s tent after more failed negotiations with the Queen and even more failed attempts to call Maia or Clary or Luke, anyone who cared about him at all. He had finally managed to break through but only gotten Maia’s voicemail; he left her a long, rambling message that he hoped she would actually hear.

“Hey. Look. So. I have a feeling you might be super pissed at me. And that is totally valid. You should be. I didn’t tell you everything that was going on because I wanted to figure it out on my own — I wanted to handle it and I didn’t want you to worry. Things have been hard enough as it is, you know? I already — I don’t feel like I’ve done a good job with you. It’s kind of crazy to me that you still wanted to go out with me after I messed up our first date and then messed up in front of my family, proved how little I knew you and how little I’d tried to. You must like me a lot. And I like you too, so much. This is the first time since I turned that I felt like the future wasn’t just total shambles. And then you got _kidnapped_ like thirty seconds after we got together and it was like — it’s like I can’t ever do anything right with you. So I tried to fix it. But I just proved that my original hypothesis was correct. I fucked up. I hope you’re not too mad at me. I will make it up to you, Maia. I swear.”

“I like her,” Meliorn remarked afterwards. “The moonchild. When I would make an excursion to her tavern, she was always free with conversation and curious about kelpies. She was also happy to accept lilac in lieu of tips.”

Simon smiled, thinking Maia was probably not as pleased about that as Meliorn may have thought. “Plants are big with you guys, huh?”

“Gaia provides, and in return we must honor her sacrifice,” he said. 

“That sounds just a little bit cult-y, but also pretty cool,” Simon offered.

Meliorn gave him the wryly amused expression he had recently developed in response to most things Simon had to say. He was in another diaphanous shirt, his hair braided over one shoulder, while he gently misted his many plants with water from a crystal object that looked like a giant perfume bottle.

“What have we got here?” Simon prompted.

Meliorn was happy to tell him. This flower that looked like an elaborate earring, with pink heart-shaped petals and a dangling white teardrop, was called a bleeding heart or lady-in-the-bath; that velvety herb that looked like Christmas but smelled like Greek takeout was dill. This was good for fever but that made the skin glow; it was a myth that fairies were born in bluebells, but one that Meliorn nevertheless found charming.

“You must water them and allow them to greet the sun, but you must also talk to them and sing to them,” Meliorn said. “And let them see you out of dress from time to time.”

Simon stared at him, uncertain if he was correctly interpreting that.

There was a definite twinkle in Meliorn’s eye. “You must give them something to live for,” he said, and Simon started laughing.

 

 

 

Simon was still afraid to eat, so the Queen arranged a feast to tempt him. Table after table was loaded with wet fruits and charred meat. Gold and silver goblets overflowed with sweet amber liquid; enameled bowls spilled their contents onto the rough wood and the dirt. There was a giant hunk of burning meat directly in front of Simon, little blue flowers studding its surface. He watched a goblin’s sharp teeth tear into the flesh of some poor mystery creature, juice dribbling down its chin. Someone was singing and it was making Simon dizzy; everything was heady and exciting but somehow dark, dangerous. The air was fragrant with sweetness but there was something underneath the perfume that made his mouth water, something that he realized abruptly was blood.

The nymphs surrounded Simon in a cooing crowd, their hands on his shoulders and cheeks against his, warmer than him and petal-smooth. They tried to put firm round berries against his lips, and one of them even kissed him, her mouth tasting suspiciously tinny. Simon turned his face away until his head was spinning. Aliens would have been better, but there were some things he knew.

When the Queen’s attention was absorbed by the dancers who had taken over the middle of the room, Meliorn pressed a copper cup into Simon’s hand under the table. “It came from aboveground,” he murmured, soft as a breeze. “You are safe to take it.”

Blood glimmered in its depths and Simon gulped gratefully, recognizing the dull bovine taste with more relief than he ever would have expected. When he finished, the cup was whisked away like it had never been and women with flower crowns urged him to sink his teeth into slices of bloody peach. Simon pretended and the Queen was satisfied and later he spit the fruit out.

In Meliorn’s tent, Simon used a muslin cloth to scrub nectar and blood from his skin until it was red. “I need to get out of here,” he said urgently. “I need to leave.”

It could not have been so many days if no one had come for him.

Meliorn looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Finally he took the cloth from Simon and began to dab more gently at the stains. “Sleep, and on the morrow we will call an audience.” 

“That’s it?” Simon knew he sounded desperate, but there had been so many audiences, so many attempts to strike a deal. Whatever schedule the Seelie Queen was following, she hadn’t shared with him.

“That is it,” Meliorn confirmed, then hesitated before continuing, “Not every Seelie in the court is privy to our lady’s plans, but it is my opinion that she does not intend to keep you forever.”

Simon didn’t know what was more ominous: that it was a possibility to be kept forever, or that she might have better use of him in world where he was supposed to be safe. Well, saf _er_.

“On the morrow, then,” Simon said with a sigh.

 

 

 

When he asked about her intentions, the Queen laughed. She was little again, sitting cross-legged on her throne while her attendants wove vines into her long hair. She gestured him over and Simon stepped atop the dais nervously. He did not look at Meliorn, whose face was stone again.

The Queen touched Simon’s forehead, three cool fingers resting dainty and strange against his skin. “Do not fret, Daylighter,” she said. “It won’t be so long now. How about a song while we wait?”


End file.
